AT 16, HERNY SANCHEZ'S NAMESAKE LIVES TO SEE HIS VINDICATION ON UT SYSTEM TSC "PARTNERSHIP"

By Juan Montoya

Our son Jose Enrique's birthday is today.

He was born 16 years ago and was named after the late Texas State Rep. Henry Sanchez, who died earlier that year around Charro Days. In fact, Henry, myself and his friend Floyd Delinger, a Houston developer, were in the Sanchez family's condominium when he checked out with a ruptured aorta. Henry sat down on a kitchen chair, closed his eyes and snored twice and that was it.

Every time that Charro Days and Sept. 27 (Kike's birthday) comes around, we remember Henry.

Now, 16 years after his death, one of the major incentives that led Henry to establish a weekly tabloid (Crossroads) has been realized. Being a former state representative, he could read between the lines and what he read in the bill that created the partnership between the University of Texas System and Texas Southmost College sent his blood level soaring.

"There isn't any money for the university in this bill," Henry would fume. "All they're going to use our college district is as a taxing entity to pay for it."

Not too many local people blinded by the allure of the burnt orange cow head perched on the colkege buildings wanted to listen to Henry. The local elite resisted his tirades and as a a result of a muted boycott of the weekly, advertising revenue was limited, forcing Henry to rely on the not inconsiderable Tijerina (his wife was Maria Luisa) gas and oil revenues to fund it.

He had talked me out working for Cameron County and to help him with the weekly and I did. He dedicated himself to drum up advertising businesses and battled the undercurrent of resistance waged by the likes of Mary Rose Cardenas and her brood and those interests supporting the "partnership."

It go to the point that in order to cover some of the distribution costs, he and Maria Luisa would drive around the Rio Viejo subdivision in their robin-egg blue Cadillac tossing out rolled copies of the Crossroads in the lawns of the residents there. More than one time, some of those residents who supported the Juliet Garcia administration and the UTB-TSC nightmare would angrily toss back the paper or would call the office to complain about it appearing on their doorstep.

But Henry was indefatigable.

"UTB has to stand on its own feet," he would rail, scratching the fungus infection on his forefinger that he contracted while operating a clothing enterprise in Guatemala. "They can't be subsidized by the poor people of South Texas. They have plenty money. Whoever supported this bill should be made to answer."
"That's one thing I remember about my uncle," said Robert Sanchez, also known as Capt. Bob, of restaurant fame. "He was a a bulldog. It's no wonder that he was named the Ironman of the University of Colorado Buffaloes football team. He would play offense and defense and just wouldn't let go."

It took 20 years after the "partnership" was in effect for a group of local elected officials at the college district to realize that after pumping approximately $1 billion in local resources (transfers and bond indebtedness), it was time for the college district to wean its overgrown suckling from the subsidy tit.

To their credit, they did.

It is now, as Kike was when he was born, a new infant on its way to independence.

With any luck, he will grow up to be someone like Henry who lived up to his convictions and whose principles have now been vindicated by the new generation of political leadership.

Happy birthday son. And thank you for your vision Henry.